Gimkit cosmetics are visual items players earn by answering questions in 2D game modes. They cover character skins called Gims, particle trails, and lobby stickers. None of them affect scores or gameplay speed. Gimkit released the first cosmetics on April 12, 2022, and the system has grown steadily since then with Packs added in March 2025. What Are Gimkit Cosmetics and How Do They Work? Cosmetics work through XP earned in Gimkit 2D game modes . Every 1,000 XP moves a player up one level, ...

Is it time to start burning down datacenters? Some people think so. An Indianapolis city council member had his house recently shot up for supporting datacenters, and Sam Altman’s home was firebombed (and then shot ) shortly afterwards. People from all sides of the argument are sounding the alarm about imminent violence. The obvious historical comparison is Luddism , the 19th-century phenomenon where English weavers and knitters destroyed the machines that were automating their w...

Michael Rabin passed away on April 14, 2026 at the age of 94.  (Scott Aaronson has also blogged about his passing, see   here .)  I had many points to make about him; however, the first one got so long that I will just do that one for today's blog post. Rabin is an extremely well rounded \(\ldots\) computer scientist? Computer scientist seems too narrow, and the point of this point is that he is well rounded. So I will start this thought again. The following is an extremely important questio...

It's been one of those months, and by that, I mean one of the 663 months since I was born. This won't be a long post, because I only have two things to say. First, I'm really glad we re-ordered the GMI (Guaranteed Minimum Income) rural study counties so Mercer County, WV, my Dad's county, went first in October 2025. I knew dad was close to the end, and sure enough, that was the last time I ever saw him. You can kinda sorta meet my dad on this page, if you want to. Why Pledge to Share the Amer...

I’m in school 1 again.  I’m going back to school because my work, my entire career, for my entire adult life, has been writing things for the Internet. That’s going away, at least as a livable career option. By livable, I mean an option I can live with .  When I started writing for the Internet, early 2000s, I could find decent paying gigs on Craigslist. A quarter a word wasn’t uncommon. It wasn’t easy — I spent a lot of time searching and researching and answering inane q...

This is an edited transcript of the keynote I gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026. I first wrote a draft of this talk by hand. This part took 2 months. I then recorded myself giving a version of this talk with MacWhisper , and transcribed it with Whisper locally. This part took 45 minutes (the total time of my practice run.) Then, I ran it through Gemini Flash 2.5 running in Pi to break into paragraphs. I also had Gemini break up my slid...

Our Moon and Earth captured by the Artemis II Orion spacecraft using a camera at the tip of one of its solar panels. Image: NASA There’s an unsaid rule in the space industry: the more popular a mission or a program, the more inaccurate its broader coverage and public discussions, especially by people who aren’t thinking about space everyday. NASA’s Artemis II mission and its four astronauts flying around the Moon naturally had its share of whimsical coverage and social media fluff t...

Path Robotics’ welding quadruped, via Nima Gard on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at a quadruped welding robot, the China Shock 2.0, transformer startups, China’s mysteriously moving satellites, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but working on a more involved piece about constru...

Anthropic today quietly (as in silently , no announcement anywhere at all) updated their claude.com/pricing page (but not their Choosing a Claude plan page , which shows up first for me on Google) to add this tiny but significant detail (arrow is mine, and it's already reverted ): The Internet Archive copy from yesterday shows a checkbox there. Claude Code used to be a feature of the $20/month Pro plan, but according to the new pricing page it is now exclusive to the $100/month or $20...

I accidentally published a few hundred drafts yesterday. I was messing with a new Hugo build pipeline, and symlinked something where it shouldn’t be. It was less destructive than getting the if and of wrong in dd(1) , but it still wasn’t ideal. I heard you like infinite recursion, so I…! Only one made it through to the RSS feed I think, and it was my evolving thoughts on Australia’s teen social media ban which is proving much harder to write and cite than I expected. Who would hav...

The kitchen was scattered with rainbows as the sun shone through the frosted glass. Maybe the glass was put there to make rainbows; what was the architect thinking when they designed this place? I saw the shadows of my head and my hair cast onto the cabinets. Can I make a shadow puppet? I raised my hands and tried to make shapes. My favourite was the love heart, which, through the way the light was cast into the room, had another love heart in a slightly lighter shade of grey behind it. We made ...

I was recently listening to an episode of The Idea Roastery about personal life gamechangers and toward the end of the episode, Herman asked Jason: What is the best purchase you've ever made for less than £100? For Jason is was an egg poacher, and for Herman it was a coffee grinder. This discussion got me thinking about what mine was, and I really wasn't sure at first. But after some thought, it hit me. It's my dog, Tia! She's getting old now, at nearly 14 years of age. But m...

Scott’s Seeing Like a State describes what large organizations need to manage a system. Everything must be made visible, countable, and comparable; in other words everything must be standardized. The problem is that standardization serves the center, not the periphery. It simplifies administration, but at the cost of destroying local adaptations that made things actually work. For example, precolonial land tenure systems that assigned use rights in complex ways according to season, kinship...

Consider the following problem. Given a string, you must match all of the ASCII white-space characters ( \t , \n , \r , and the space) and some characters important in JSON ( : , , , [ , ] , { , } ). JSON is a text-based data format used for web services. A toy JSON document looks as follows. { "name" : "Alice" , "age" : 30 , "email" : "alice@example.com" , "tags" : [ "developer" , "python" , "open-source" ], "active" : true } We want to solve...

256 Lines or Less: Test Case Minimization Apr 20, 2026 Property Based Testing and fuzzing are a deep and science-intensive topic. There are enough advanced techniques there for a couple of PhDs, a PBT daemon, and a client-server architecture . But I have this weird parlor-trick PBT library, implementable in a couple of hundred lines of code in one sitting. This week I’ve been thinking about a cool variation of a consensus algorithm. I implemented it on the weekend. And it took just ...

Humid air swirls with colorful spirits. They trace its invisible currents in spirals through open spaces, cling to branches, drip down stone faces and, awakened by the first beams of the rising sun, ooze newly out of trees like sap. Lulls of wind leave them gliding gently downward to be picked up again. From a distance, eddies of the spirits’ malleable confetti travel along plains. With translucent jellylike hands and fingers they wave at each other in passing or hold each other in breeze-pert...

My experience on a five day alpinism course to the Grossvenediger. My experience on a five day alpinism course to the Grossvenediger.

Last week Thoughtworks released the 34th volume of our Technology Radar . This radar is our biannual survey of our experience of the technology scene, highlighting tools, techniques, platforms, and languages that we’ve used or otherwise caught our eye. This edition contains 118 blips, each briefly describing our impressions of one of these elements. As we would expect, the radar is dominated by AI-oriented topics. Part of this is revisiting familiar ground with LLM-assisted eyes: An...

Something I didn't understand for a while is that the process of turning row-oriented data into column-oriented data isn't a totally bespoke, foreign concept in the realm of databases. It's still of the relational abstraction. Or can be. As an example, say we have this data: data = [ { "name" : "Smudge" , "colour" : "black" }, { "name" : "Sissel" , "colour" : "grey" }, { "name" : "Hamlet" , "colour" : "black" } ] This represents a tab...

WASHINGTON — (April 20, 2026)  — Shield AI announced today its selection by the United States Navy to provide contractor-owned, contractor-operated (COCO) intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) services in support of naval and joint force operations.    Under the Navy’s initiative to expand and modernize ISR capabilities, Shield AI will compete for up to $800 million in task orders alongside other selected industry partners, delivering persistent ISR using its V-BAT v...

How to generate and sign with SLH-DSA very quickly, with only mild side effects. How to generate and sign with SLH-DSA very quickly, with only mild side effects.

I've spent the last 2 years building and interviewing candidates for AI Engineering roles. So I've been fortunate enough to watch the career track evolve from being a fringe amorphous role fueled by hype to a growing discipline in and of itself. AI Engineering as a term is still pretty fuzzy but for the purposes of this blog post, I define an AI Engineer as an engineer whose primary expertise is developing systems and solutions which integrate AI platforms and stacks. It's an intersection of sk...

Notes on Go's newly accepted uuid proposal and the tradeoffs behind the API. Notes on Go's newly accepted uuid proposal and the tradeoffs behind the API.